Alexander Graham Bell's notebook entry of 10 Mar. 1876 describes his successful experiment with the telephone. Speaking through the instrument to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room, Bell utters these famous first words, “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” Every since this time, engineers, marketers and consumers have been on a quest for the faster delivery of more information through telecommunication and/or computer networks. In a short period of time, we have moved from 300 baud modems delivering data to the home to full-blown T1 carriers, cable modems and DSL lines bringing data to consumers at millions of bits per second.
Although the technological advances in the speed of data delivery have astonishing, they are still challenged by the imagination of users. As bandwidth and data rate increases, users continue to come up with applications that challenge the capabilities of the current state of technology. Applications that require the downloading of extensive amounts of data, audio files, video files and graphics can easily challenge the bandwidth and data throughput capabilities of home and office network solutions. At the data rates increase, then the quality of the audio, video or other data will also improve, thereby requiring the download of even more data and once again challenging the throughput of the network.
As a result, users are somewhat accustomed, especially in the realm of personal computer applications, to waiting at least some period of time for a data file, audio file, video file or graphics file to download before they can utilize the file. More specifically, for downloading audio files, the users are used to waiting several seconds while a streamed audio file is downloaded, or at least a significant amount of the file is loaded into a buffer.
In the context of a voice mail system, such delays are not acceptable. Thus, there is a need in the art for a technique to minimize or alleviate the delay experienced by a user downloading an audio file, especially in the context of the delivery of voice mail message through a telecommunications system.